In light of this in the course of the past week, I pulled out a little ditty I had dashed off (and never posted) one hot midnight, in the waning days of August and September, 2004. Such shame the Kerry/Edwards campaign foisted upon itself. The week that Reid apologises for "tone" and for ''naming'' Republicans, that campaign roamed into my mind again.

Tell us again about the mob, the Gaming Commission and the bombs ...? Not that we ever bought that whopper.

Then I caught Kerry on This Week with Stephanopoulos. Kerry needs to retire and find a hobby.

Later came Hillary, C-Span delivered her to me, and her lecturing speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton. She skipped advising us about the plantation (and she knows what, I wonder), but she did cover Iran (danger), Israel (we are loyal forever), Sharon (man of peace) and that the Palestinians must prove... something, a lot no doubt.

Time to post my ditty...

Dated 9/27/2004

Bark, meow, Mother may I bark and may my friend meow?

But let us know if you don't like us and then we won't... sorry to be asking, did we interrupt, we can speak more softly, really we can... Let us show you! We aim to please!... We are the politically correct warriors! WARRIOR! We are yelling...

Did the tree fall in the empty forest? Did anyone hear, or care? Are we the tree or the forest, is it a sprint or marathon? What is it? Tell us so we can figure it out...

We learned things in school, we love school. They taught us to read. We love books. We travel. We try not to look around, we might see or hear... or learn. Better we do not.

I am sure, very sure we registered voters... oh I am sorry, you say we should have registered some Republican voters?, oh so sorry we will get right on it! Please, always tell us the rules of the road...maybe McCain can call us... why don't we hear from him? He used to like us...? What happened?

Some say we used to win, did we? We must have been ba-a-ad asses, don't want to be that, you need your space, we understand. "Understand", that is what liberals do -- bad word! slap wrist, BUT! we are courageous to say it! We stand up for ourselves! We do. We are 3 feet tall and reaching for the door knob. We step aside for you. You have your needs. We are here for you. We understand. We do that well.

Cotton Choppers. Sherard Plantation.
Sherard, Mississippi, 1992.

You are the biggest baddie that ever was... we crown you, we are prostrate before you. You are the Father and the Mother. Holy Ghost too! Did Ratzinger say we could say that? Or speak in Mass? Can we take communion? Does anyone know? We heard the Catholics are mad?....

Should we register some Republicans in Cincinnati? Would that help?, we'll do it!... or I know, Miami!, yes we will, we will find deaf elderly Cubans who still believe in anti communism and know nothing. Ones that are still mad over Elian, believe he was a jesus from the sea!

Yes, right away sir. Please send us a list. We know how to register people, it is FUN, so collegiate, it is the work left to liberals.. oh! Bad Word! But we are courageous to SAY it, yes we are... . Oh sure they vote, why not, we registered them!... we say we are happy happy happy that Kerry is the candidate.

Plantation shack in cotton field.
Mississippi Delta 1990.

Yes, he is elect-able! Based on what, you ask?... oh the others, they were -- unacceptable. And, maybe, what did they say?, they told us someone was angry. Oh! I am sure not us. No, that is not like us... we are never intemperate. That left electable. It was based on a math, oh no, myth, it says MYTH, it says here, based on a mythical equation.

OK, not math, sure, we know about math. We learned in school. After Civics Class, so important. Then we signed up for PoliSci, yes we did, so important... Oh now? Now, we are pre-law. Yes, foundation of democracy. Rule of Law, and we know things. It says here,

DO YOU WANT ANTI-ABORTION JUDGES? VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS. hmmm I don't think the Catholics want us to say that...

uh, OK, the cheat sheet says, ''it's about the Supreme Court''. How did we forget. We have an entire list of Talking Points: it says ''Supreme Court'' 20 times over. See, we know it is important. Civics class. We learned it.

Downtown on July 4.
Sledge, Mississippi, 1992.

And Kerry says: send me. Or did Bill tell us that. No, Bill told us: Fall in love then fall in line. Or was that pillow talk with Monica. Oh maybe it was. We are confused. He wants this, trust us. We register voters. Our civic Duty. We know about government. They taught us in school. We value school, we fight for education. The environment. Wait, there is... that list we talk from... oh, it too says, Fall in Love then Fall in line. uh, I think we did that, but did we fall in love... ?

River baptism, Moon Lake.
Coahoma County, Mississippi, 1989.

That's it! We love the Supreme Court! Of course we do!

Wait it says, in the tinier print: Suck it up sucka! My, such language. Not liberal... oh you say we tell ourselves that about Losing.. Oh yes, well, then fine. We are fine with that...It must be Civic Duty.

Our Civic Duty.

....and the Republicans laugh laugh laugh laugh all the way to the seats of power.

= = = = = = = = = =

Shortly after the 2004 loss I heard Kennedy say, with some anger it seemed, that only 43% of eligible blacks are registered to vote in Mississippi. There had been many statements from Democrats, up to and including Kerry (who waffled, he said Zell told him his speeches were good to go in the South, in interview with CNN/Judy Woodruff), that they ''did not need the South to win''. The Democratic ticket did not carry Edwards' home district in North Carolina, as it happens. Fools, and worse.

By late August 1964, four project volunteers had been killed, four others critically wounded, 80 physically beaten, and one thousand arrested. During the Freedom Summer, 37 black churches were firebombed and burned, and thirty black-owned homes and businesses were destroyed.

However, the Freedom Summer highlighted the struggle for voting rights and social justice for blacks in the Deep South as never before. Within the next year, pushed by the Johnson Administration, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The effects of its passage and implementation across the South, and especially in Mississippi, were dramatic.

In August 1965, only 6.7 percent of Mississippi blacks were registered to vote. By August 1967, 59.8 percent of Mississippiâ€™s African Americans were registered, the highest percentage of black registered voters anywhere in the region.

The tragic aftermath of Freedom Summer in Mississippi today is found in the disturbing disfranchisement of African-American voters in that state, due to unfair election restrictions. In Mississippi, residents convicted of a felony lose their right to vote for the remainder of their lives.

By 2000, about one-third of the stateâ€™s black male voters were ineligible from voting. A similar situation exists in many other states.

Until several years ago, both the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus were slow to recognize the serious erosion of black voting power due to these restrictions on ex-prisoners.

I have often wondered why as we enter the 21st Century that their plight has been ignored, their freedom from want and their voices go unheard and unanswered.

I think back to those days as I watched my parent's T.V., 13 years old and drawn by the fears of the missing Civil Rights workers and what I saw. I think of the hopes that I held in my heart. Surely, America wouldn't turn her eyes from places such as the Mississippi Delta.

Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

Today we open with some cites from a story at Counterpunch by Elizabeth Schulte that recalls pre-Roe vs. Wade days. We'll close with a different one, too.

Pam at Pandagon has good entries up on Kaine, just installed this past week as Democratic governor of Virginia, mantle bearer for Warner (he of high hopes). Kaine, who gay baited in his run, supported always the party line dross about what marriage is (or is not!), then tapped for the SOTU response (get it? the party DOES have a message, and Kaine is the bearer...) - and now will sign the gay marriage ban despite being ''uncomfortable'' with the wording.

Gay rights activists embrace under a flag made up of the Spanish and rainbow flags outside parliament in Madrid after same-sex marriages were legalised despite fierce opposition from the Catholic church.
[Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters]

Josh Israel, president of the Virginia Partisans Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club, which endorsed Kaine, said he hopes the newly installed governor will at least work to make the ballot language more reflective of the amendment's wide scope.

"We would certainly hope that the governor will consider using his power to make sure the language and process is fair," Israel said.

I know Kilgore was a horror, I watched (from out in CA) two debates between Kaine and Kilgore, but the party is using the Kilgores of America as an excuse.

Don't let them. The politics and philosophy of non-violent engagement waged by Dr King properly used the violence of the Bull Connors, the whips, the dogs, the water hoses, all of it - to further America and her people.

Don't let the cowards of America use hate to sell hate-lite. They want to take us back and the Democrats, too many of them, have joined with the hard right, the white, christian, male-dominant right.

It is NOT electoral pragmatism. It is hatred and division.

By 1960, four states in the United States had not desegregated their public schools since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 had been handed down. They were South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

But! Not to worry, bigots know best - and they never give up:

"It's unfortunate that those that oppose the marriage amendment are using issues like domestic violence as scare tactics," said Victoria Cobb, executive director of the Family Foundation in Virginia.

But gay rights and domestic violence activists point to other states' interpretations of marriage amendments, as well as the promises of amendment supporters before the referendum.

"What we're expecting is that for all these people that said 'the sky is falling' to reverse their position," Phil Burress, spokesperson for the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, told the Columbus Dispatch after voters approved that state's marriage amendment in 2004. "This is not going to affect the elderly. It's not going to affect private contracts. What it's going to do is stop marriage by a different name."

If the candidate and his or her party doesn't represent your interests, if in another era they would block school desegregation, block the Voting Rights Act, block the Civil Rights Act, block Loving v Virginia, which, so late (1967), undid laws against miscegenation: DON'T VOTE FOR THEM.

Dixiecrats, whether North or South (and they are BOTH places), we don't need them!

"We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

"In the poem 'The Family,' our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, 'How does man live in denial in vain by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?'

"Today, the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years have, been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed.

Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.

"It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph.

It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty.

Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, There is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married.

To the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.

"Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in a profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

"With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives.

Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.

"Today we demonstrate with this Bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens.

Today, for many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] one century ago:

'Later 'twas said of the most perfect society/someone else, made like me/certainly will come out and act freely.' "

After all, in my state I cannot hope or expect to see same-sex marriage pass, but I certainly expect the Democrats not to have to exact same position on it as the Republicans. I need Dems to make a stand that our state Constitution should not be altered to discriminate against us.

Todayâ€™s Dems are so fixated by winning that core values donâ€™t matter; itâ€™s about job security and pandering to the emotions and not the brains of the sheeple, instead of risk-taking and reframing difficult issues that have been hijacked and demonized (successfully) by the Rove machine.

The larger question hovering over the Democrats, like any other out-of-power party, is how to strike the right balance between conviction and expediency. Rich Galen, a Republican strategist, expressed the consultants-know-best argument in the most bipartisan tone he could muster: "As we Republicans learned with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition, those on the ideological edges are willing to lose an election on the grounds of doctrinal purity. Consultants don't do that. Consultants are in the business of winning elections."

But Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ("Primary Colors") will argue in a new book coming out this spring, "Paradise Lost," that misjudgments by Democratic consultants have played a major role in leaving the party without a power base more influential than the state of Illinois. And from my own vantage point, the Democrats' positioning on the eavesdropping issue invites comparisons to their fetal crouch in the run-up to the Iraqi War. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bush's go-to-war resolution -- including John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- at least partly because the pollsters insisted that it was the only politically safe position, a ludicrous and self-destructive notion in hindsight.

The problem with a consultant-driven overreliance on polling data is that it is predicated on the assumption that nothing will happen to jar public opinion out of its current grooves. As Elaine Kamarck, a top advisor in the Clinton-Gore White House and a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued, "These guys [the consultants] just don't get it. They don't understand that in politics strength is better than weakness. And a political party that is always the namby-pamby 'me too' party is a party that isn't going to get anyplace." Molly Ivins wonders at the Democrats' seeming affection for this weakness:

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?Leila Hessini gives it all a global perspective:

In 1973, the United States was part of a global trend to reform restrictive abortion laws that resulted in the unnecessary deaths and injuries of millions of women. After the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade secured the right to abortion, access to safe abortion care dramatically reduced maternal deaths and injuries. Despite this healthy trend, right-wing conservatives immediately began a crusade to undermine women's health and self-determination, promoting conservative ideology over public health interests and significantly limiting women's access to safe abortion services.

While things are bad in the United States, they are much worse globally. Nearly one-quarter of all adult women in developing countries suffer illness or injury related to pregnancy and childbirth. One hundred twenty million couples want to delay childbearing but do not have access to modern contraceptive methods. Many more lack access to essential obstetric care, which leads to 515,000 maternal deaths each year. And not coincidentally, approximately 70,000 women die each year due to unsafe abortions and millions more are temporarily or permanently disabled.

So how has the Bush administration shown compassion for these women? On his second day in office, President George W. Bush reinstated the global gag rule. It prohibits foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive U.S. funds for family planning from providing abortion services, including referrals, even when these activities are supported by their non-U.S. funds and are lawful under their own legal system. While freedom of expression remains a constitutional right in the United States, our foreign assistance is used as a vehicle to impose an ideological agenda that undermines that right around the world. Through the gag rule, the U.S. government is proclaiming that women outside the United States should not benefit from a right that American women, at least theoretically, enjoy.

While proponents of the gag rule maintain that its imposition is necessary to reduce the number of abortions, research shows that it accomplishes just the opposite.Jaye Ramsey Sutter at BlondSense pulls back the politically cinematic curtain:

Women are like the unsuspecting Janet Leigh in Psycho. Women think they are free to drive their own car, plan their own route, but they never anticipate that Norman Bates, armed with his butcher's knife, will work out his issues with women and their bodies on them. The ironic thing is women trusted that they had won the battle, secured their reproductive freedom and they could rest easy, sleep tight, that their rights, once gained, will remain. A happy ending with equality. They are surprised to learn that other plans had been made.

In the end, Molly says it best:

If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.Astroturfing "netroots" folks, take note.

Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - An abortion-rights supporter says she's upset that the final report of the South Dakota Abortion Task Force was altered from the version approved at a Dec. 9 meeting.

Kate Looby, state director of Planned Parenthood, said the changes were made without the knowledge of abortion-rights advocates on the panel. Looby said she thinks the action was designed to protect the state against a potential libel suit.